Strata snow & ice · Burnaby
Strata snow removal in Burnaby, on a plan your council can hold us to
Snow and ice management for Burnaby strata corporations — Section 31 sidewalk compliance, tower parkade ramps and the Burnaby Mountain elevation problem.
What Burnaby requires
Section 31 of the Street and Traffic Bylaw makes the owner or occupier responsible for clearing snow and ice from the sidewalks around the property by 10am every day, including holidays, to a minimum cleared width of 1.2 metres. The fine for a business is $80 per day.
City of Burnaby, Street and Traffic Bylaw, Section 31
What will my property cost?
Most addresses get a price range on the next screen. Free, no obligation.
Takes about a minute · Your address stays with us
$5M liability insured · WorkSafeBC registered
Section 31 is stricter than most councils realise
Most Metro Vancouver sidewalk bylaws give property owners until 10am and quietly stand down on statutory holidays. Burnaby’s does not. Section 31 of the Street and Traffic Bylaw makes the owner or occupier responsible for clearing the sidewalks around the property by 10am every day, holidays included, to a minimum cleared width of 1.2 metres — and the fine for a business runs at $80 per day.
For a strata corporation that duty sits with council. It is not the city’s job and it is not the individual owner’s job, and a corporation that assumes otherwise usually finds out on the morning of 26 December.
The 1.2 metre figure matters more than it looks. It is a width, not a path — a shovel-width track down the middle of a sidewalk is not compliance, and it is also the exact thing a plaintiff’s photograph will show three inches of.
Two winters in one city
Burnaby is the only municipality we serve where the same contract can span a genuine climate split. Big Bend sits close to sea level on the Fraser flats. Burnaby Mountain runs to roughly 370 metres. In a marginal storm — which is most of them here — the lower property is getting rain while the upper one is accumulating, and a contractor running one trigger for both is either over-servicing the bottom or missing the top.
We treat elevation as a routing input, not a footnote. A Metrotown or Brentwood tower, a Big Bend townhouse complex and an SFU-area property sit on different trigger thresholds in the same plan, which is also why a single flat per-visit price across a mixed portfolio tends to be wrong in both directions.
Where Burnaby strata properties actually fail
The recurring problem is not the parking lot. It is the seam between surfaces: the lip where a parkade ramp meets the sidewalk, the transition from a cleared drive aisle onto an uncleared visitor path, the shaded north side of a tower that refreezes after everything else has dried.
Parkade ramps are the sharpest case. A ramp that drains toward the street sends meltwater across the bylaw frontage, where it refreezes overnight into exactly the surface Section 31 exists to prevent. Treating the ramp and ignoring the ten feet below it produces a compliant ramp and a liability.
What council actually needs from a contractor
A strata council is a volunteer body making a decision it may have to defend to owners at an AGM, and occasionally to an insurer. That changes what a good proposal looks like:
- A stated response window, in hours, written into the agreement rather than implied by “24/7 monitoring”.
- Bylaw frontage mapped in, so compliance is part of the service rather than a separate conversation each storm.
- A record per visit that exists whether or not anyone asks for it — because the request usually comes months later, from a lawyer.
- A price that does not move. Salt is inside our rate rather than added to the invoice afterwards, which is the most common source of a February surprise in this trade.
If you want the number before you take it to council, put the address into the form — most Burnaby addresses get a measured price range on the next screen, and the exact quote follows by email.
Trusted by leading businesses & property managers
FAQ
Strata snow removal in Burnaby — common questions
Who is responsible for the sidewalk outside our strata — the city or the corporation?
The strata corporation. Section 31 of Burnaby's Street and Traffic Bylaw puts the duty on the owner or occupier of the property, and for a strata that is the corporation acting through council. The city clears roads, not your frontage. We map the full bylaw frontage into the service area so it is cleared on the same pass as the property itself.
Does the council have to approve the contract, or can our property manager sign it?
In BC the strata council enters into the corporation's contracts; a manager signing a service agreement without council direction is a common source of formal complaints against managers. In practice your manager usually runs the process and council passes the resolution. We are happy to provide the quote in a form that can go straight into a council package.
Our complex is on the hill. Do you price that differently from a flat site?
Yes, and it is one of the reasons we measure rather than estimate. Elevation changes how often a property triggers in a given winter, and slope changes how long a pass takes and how much material a surface needs. Both are in the quote rather than discovered in February.
What happens if it snows during the holidays?
Nothing changes. Dispatch runs on weather triggers, not on a calendar, which matters more in Burnaby than in most municipalities because the 10am deadline applies on statutory holidays too.
Can we see what was done without phoning anyone?
Every visit writes a record as it happens — time on site, GPS at both ends, material applied and photographs of the surface. That is what council minutes and an insurer want, and it is what protects the corporation if a claim arrives a year later.
Ready for winter in Burnaby?
Enter the address and most properties get a price range on the next screen — priced on the actual serviceable area, measured from satellite imagery. Your exact quote follows by email.